System D markets may have survived the megatization of business.
But haven't we forgotten how legitimate businesses with integrity emerged and grew into mega, global corporations? They started in a local community of inventors, investors, sellers and buyers. A local community is inherently transparent and individuals have the power to affect consequences when a customer is betrayed by a business - and vice versa. Since "debrouillard" literally means to "de-fog" I think it is a descriptive label of the the transparency and natural market forces when doing business in a local community context.
I don't know what political baggage is associated with it. But I certainly agree we need to recognize that we failed to anticipate what happens when business expands to a global, virtual scale and dimension.
Have you heard about the new book Locavesting?
K-
Katherine Warman Kern
203.918.2617
On Nov 6, 2011, at 7:45 AM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:
> I should add, in answer to some off-list emails, that I'm not saying here that the black market is a VRM model.
>
> Obviously System D, as described below (or as I read it) includes all illicit market activity, including drugs and prostitution. But it also includes, I would hope, some things we can learn from.
>
> One accomplishment of the #Occupy movement has been to shine a light on the failure of hierarchy in the very middle of the economy: with banking. Big banks today no longer want to loan money. They don't want your savings, except to play the financial casinos themselves. This is great news for credit unions, but the dysfunction requires many work-arounds.
>
> As we said in Cluetrain, "The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers."
>
> What should markets be today? Surely not just Wall Street. Surely not governed by federal and state institutions bought and paid for by hierarchical interests in keeping Business As Usual.
>
> Take another look at Geoffrey West's talk on cities:
>
> <http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.html>
>
> His point: Cities scale in a super-linear way. Businesses scale in a sub-linear way. So do all life forms, which is why their growth is sigmoidal: It flattens out at the top, and they eventually fall over and die. So do governments, for that matter. You can bomb a city, and it lives. Look at Hiroshima and Dresden.
>
> System D, seems to me, includes some lessons in how, at the street level, cities are horizontal entities that do much that companies and governments also try to to do vertically, or hierarchically -- for awhile, but not forever. We need both, in symboisis. But sometimes that symbiosis gets out of whack. We have that now. The hierarchies are failing. One helping the other (as Washington helped Wall Street in '08 and since) is failing. VRM isn't the answer to everything, but it's an answer that comes from the street level.
>
> Prudential and John Hancock built Boston's two highest skyscrapers. Both maintain small offices there, but neither are the Great Companies they once were. Hancock's name still graces what's now the 4th tallest building in Chicago, but the tallest no longer bears the name Sears, which built it.
>
> But big vertical things are interesting, whether they're buildings, companies or governments. They get most of the attention. But they aren't always the answer, except temporarily.
>
> This is why the sports contest of Big Biz vs. Big Gov (how the Dems and the Reps like to characterize each other in the U.S.) requires an astigmatic view. It blurs to the vertical. Cities grow horizontally, while the big institutions within grow vertically. We need both, but the more important and vital context is the horizontal one.
>
> Anyway, I think things are happening today at the street level -- P2P or C2C -- that model in an ad hoc way some of what we'd like to see with VRM.
>
> Maybe System D is too full of illegal activity to work as a model (if it really exists as a "system" at all, which is debatable). But that shouldn't stop us from looking at what happens in places where markets are still markets.
>
> Doc
>
> On Nov 5, 2011, at 10:31 PM, Doc Searls wrote:
>
>> Anybody ever heard of System D?
>>
>> It's the underground economy. Off-grid. Big in places where commerce is personal and taxes are avoided. "Unlicensed bazaars," for example.
>>
>> See here: <http://bit.ly/tEXJhL> An excerpt:
>>
>>> System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
>>
>> Sounds VRM friendly to me.
>>
>> More:
>>
>>> ...System D is on the rise. In the developing world, it's been increasing every year since the 1990s, and in many countries it's growing faster than the officially recognized gross domestic product (GDP). If you apply his percentages (Schneider's most recent report, published in 2006, uses economic data from 2003) to the World Bank's GDP estimates, it's possible to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of the billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes to this: The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn't snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century.
>>>
>>> In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global economy. All over the world -- from San Francisco to São Paulo, from New York City to Lagos -- people engaged in street selling and other forms of unlicensed trade told me that they could never have established their businesses in the legal economy. "I'm totally off the grid," one unlicensed jewelry designer told me. "It was never an option to do it any other way. It never even crossed my mind. It was financially absolutely impossible." The growth of System D opens the market to those who have traditionally been shut out.
>>>
>>> This alternative economic system also offers the opportunity for large numbers of people to find work. No job-cutting or outsourcing is going on here. Rather, a street market boasts dozens of entrepreneurs selling similar products and scores of laborers doing essentially the same work. An economist would likely deride all this duplicated work as inefficient. But the level of competition on the street keeps huge numbers of people employed. It liberates their entrepreneurial energy. And it offers them the opportunity to move up in the world.
>>
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Doc
>>
>>
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